The Rose Valley
by Chess
Summary: English Rose, he read, savoring the incredibly ordinary sound of the words. Contains love and beauty, but mostly horticulture and engravings. Gellert/Albus.


One aspect of Durmstrang that Gellert never missed was the lack of flowering plants. When he came to England and discovered a little town overflowing with flower gardens and carefully tended patches of flowering weeds, he fell in love with it a bit, perhaps even more than he fell in love with the people.

"There are beautiful garden at Hogwarts, too," Albus told him absently once, sounding as though beautiful was an abstraction that had nothing to do with him.

Gellert didn't want Hogwarts, though. He wanted the little garden outside Bathilda's house in Godric's Hollow. As the summer wore on, he and Albus spent more and more time there, talking about their grand plans for the future among the shocks of baby's breath, sweet-smelling lilies, and gladiolas edged with deep pink.

He came to associate at least some of the flowers with Albus: possibly the little star-like phlox bursting over the short stone wall that ringed Bathilda's garden.

The Bulgarian word for _garden_, Gellert knew, was градина, something he didn't bother remembering how to pronounce but could still write perfectly well, remembering it only in the characters. He didn't think it seemed very beautiful.

He looked up roses in one of Bathilda's dusty old books on a lazy Tuesday when Albus was off writing one of his never-ending letters to dull people. _English Rose_, he read, savoring the incredibly ordinary sound of the words. Bred by someone from Shropshire, of all places, this rose was the epitome of simple, common beauty.

He wondered if there were Bulgarian roses.

Reading on, he discovered that there was a color called Bulgarian Rose, a particularly ugly shade of rust-red. He frowned. Everything in Bulgarian was ugly.

Turning the page, he came across a picture of an engraving. It showed two women, one bent double with her hands full of flowers, the other looking on, already carrying her fill of roses. Beside them stood a man, also laden with a heavy basket, wearing a thickly furred hat and scowling. Gellert tilted his head as though that would help him get a better look inside the world of the engraving, and read the words below it: _The Rose Valley near Kazanlak, Bulgaria, 1870s, by Felix Philipp Kanitz_.

He frowned. The book couldn't be too bloody old, then. His eyes flickered to the opposite page, taking in the story of the Rose Valley, whose scents were apparently used in rose-oil perfume across the world and whose flowers have been picked by the Bulgarian people for longer than Gellert had been alive. During the peak season, the dusty page declared, the area is said to exude a truly heavenly scent. He wondered why Bathilda's books were always so maudlin about everything.

Gellert had always been desperately susceptible to romantic notions, though. He had never been to the Rose Valley while in Bulgaria, but he wanted to go there, suddenly and very fiercely as he wanted everything. The picture made him ache with the longing to return to his country, his _real_country, and not this dreadful English imitation.

Loyalty was not one of Gellert's strongest traits.

He wondered, then, if English roses and Bulgarian roses were so different. It wasn't a metaphor; it was just a curiosity. Then again, he always found the two countries to be deeply, irreconcilably different in so many ways. Perhaps the Rose Valley would be nothing special after all, but he quickly discounted that thought. He hoped that he could go there someday, perhaps with Albus.

*

A few brief months later, Gellert found himself miserable and alone, with nowhere to stay, no friends, and not even a bit of a garden. He really had not choice but to set out for Bulgaria again, hoping they'd forgotten or even forgiven his more egregious trespasses. On the other hand, perhaps it would be better if they hadn't forgotten.

After establishing himself in a nice little stone house for not very much rent—perhaps because it was practically toppling into the Black Sea—he made his way to Kazanlak. It was a nice little town with a broad, sweeping square in the middle. It was also more or less in the center of Bulgaria, and he vowed never to return to the rented house by the shore.

The town also contained a gorgeous library, Gellert was delighted to discover. Most importantly, though, the people were open and simple and seemed to be hiding no dark, disturbing secrets. Good. Gellert was quite sure he'd had enough of other people's secrets.

When winter came and the town grew dull, he set out to do something that had been in the back of his mind since midsummer. After making a few inquiries, he managed to discover that the engraver, Kanitz, was still alive and living in Austria. Distasteful as the prospect of going to Austria was, Gellert was determined to meet him.

The trip turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. More than a bit, actually, as he could not even bring himself to speak to Kanitz.

Gellert found him in a museum, after asking the right people the right questions in an approximation of their language. Kanitz was standing in front of a particularly ugly painting, looking old and bent. Gellert shouldn't have been surprised, the man must have been nearly seventy.

Still, something about watching him stand there in the museum looking at hideous art made Gellert suddenly, passionately angry, and he stumbled out of the museum without the engraver even seeing him.

On the steps, snow was falling, and Gellert looked up in surprise. The sky was already growing dark, but the snow brightened the otherwise extremely dreary streets.

He wouldn't allow himself to live on impressions anymore, he promised silently, tightening his cold fingers into fists. No more romantic dreams or fairy tales, only the truth. Even as he swore it, he knew it was a lie. Where would he have been without fairy tales?

He had promised his friends—oh yes, he already had several dozen friends back in Kazanlak–he'd be home by Christmas Eve. He glanced back at the museum once more and then disapparated.

When he showed up at his friends' house, cheeks red from traveling, one of them said, "You look happy, Gellert."

He frowned. They always assumed he looked happy, no matter what he was actually feeling. Perhaps it was the hair. He'd have to do something about that. For now, he would smile at them and try to get through dinner. Pity. He hated blood sausage with a passion, perhaps mostly out of spite.

That May dawned brilliant and warm, even in Bulgaria, as the beginning of the twentieth century crept across the world. Gellert was delighted by this, as it felt only right for his life to begin anew just as the century did. He remembered, though, that it was May, and something that had been bothering him since winter came floating up from the back of his mind.

So he left Kazanlak for the second time, although he didn't have nearly as far to go this time. On the way out of town, he stopped one of the numerous irritatingly pretty young women who lived there with a light touch on her arm.

"_Rozova dolina?_ " he inquired, loving the way his accent shaded to Bulgarian with such great ease even after those months in England.

She smiled and pointed him in the right direction.

This time, Gellert was not disappointed. The Rose Valley was everything he dreamed it would be, sprawling bushes covering the ground, and soft pink flowers springing up from every corner of the valley. It smelled, if not heavenly, at least like life and earth and home. Gellert had lived in far too many homes to ever have a fixed point that was his own, but this scent came close to meaning the same thing.

"You should be here, Albus," he muttered under his breath, but he knew better. Albus would never have appreciated the beauty of this place. This was something Gellert would keep for himself alone.

*

In later years, his followers often wondered why he surrounded many of his strongholds with flower gardens. Once, a young man with a strong jaw who he thought might be named Andreiasked him in rough English, "Do they not make you to seem weak?"

Gellert smiled. "No. In fact, I've found them to be quite useful. No one is going to trample over a flowerbed, even to invade a castle."

He often made a point of speaking English around his followers, especially intricate English, or slang. He found that it confused and irritated them, and he took some measure of delight in that. He found that to be a leader, one did not have to be grim or even unnecessarily cruel. Surrounding himself with beautiful things and people who made him laugh made him happier and allowed people to underestimate him. One of his favorite things was seeing the shock on people's faces when he proved he could do the Crutiatus Curse after all.

He wondered how long it would take Albus to make his way to Bulgaria. When he did, Gellert knew, he would not be surprised at all. Albus would, perhaps, look around at all the beauty and say, "I understand." Despite Albus's vagueness, he had always been frustratingly good at understanding the things that even Gellert could not quite grasp about himself.

Gellert was growing up, though, and when Albus finally came, perhaps Gellert would simply offer him a rose. This simple gesture, stripped of all romance by now, might mean more than a curse.


End file.
